Aroostook group sticks with salmon restoration

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Just downstream from Jim Barresi’s rustic cabin, a wide trough of swift water sweeps through a deep hole, inviting anglers.

About 90 years ago – before Tinker Dam was built in New Brunswick, Barresi says, the spot used to be an Atlantic salmon pool.

It’s a long trip from the tiny Maine town of Wade, which sits on the Aroostook River, to Tinker, but Barresi and other members of Atlantic Salmon for Northern Maine have long recognized that the New Brunswick dam would have to be a key cog in any salmon restoration efforts.

Those efforts began more than 30 years ago, and continue today, thanks to the hard work and generosity of Atlantic Salmon for Northern Maine and its corporate allies.

The big obstacle: dams.

Three dams stand between the Aroostook River and the sea and can stop the progress of adult fish that return from the ocean in order to find their home rivers and spawn.

And after initial progress was made on the St. John River’s water quality several years ago, Barresi said his club recognized what had to happen next.

“We knew we had to put a fishway in, so we raised a quarter of a million dollars and put a fishway back in at Maine Public Services dam [across the Canadian border from Fort Fairfield],” Barresi said.

That money, to be spent at Tinker Dam, was raised in the late 1980s, and the fishway has eliminated one obstacle. The cage-style trap holds fish at the base of the dam and is checked twice a day.

Atlantic salmon are separated from other species and trucked above the dam, where they are released. Other species are dropped back below the dam.

From above the dam, salmon have a chance to “free swim” into their rivers of origin.

Barresi and others maintain that “free swim” is a key component of restoration efforts, pointing out that fish don’t arrive in Canadian or Maine rivers with destination tags attached. Free swim allows them to travel up the tributaries of the St. John as they wish, and it’s essential.

“If you put them in the main stem [of the St. John] if it was a Tobique-origin fish, it can go up there through the fishway,” said Trevor Goff, the hatchery manager at the Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility near Fredericton, New Brunswick. “If it came from Salmon River, it can go up there. Or if it came from the Aroostook it can go up the fishway at Aroostook River.”

And that’s exactly what Barresi and others are hoping happens.

“Our own fish will be able to say, ‘Oh, I smell home. I’m going that way,'” Barresi said.

Atlantic salmon imprint upon their native river, and when returning to fresh water after time at sea, they are thought to use olfactory clues to sniff their way back home.

The problem that the Aroostook River restoration faced was that there weren’t any fish left that were imprinted to return to Maine.

“[After the fishway was built] people said, ‘Well, where are all the fish?'” Barresi said. “Well, the fish weren’t in the river, [and] if there weren’t any in the Aroostook, there weren’t any to come back to the Aroostook. So I said, ‘Boys, we’ve got to build a hatchery.'”

That hatchery, at Dug Brook in Sheridan, was built in the early 1990s, thanks to donations of money, labor, and material. It is insured for $200,000, though Barresi doubts it could rebuilt for that amount.

Atlantic Salmon for Northern Maine operates the private facility and buys eggs from Goff’s crew at Mactaquac. Those eggs are then sent to Dug Brook, where they’re hatched and released into the Aroostook River before they begin feeding.

Barresi said raising salmon fry instead of the larger smolts was a cost-saving method that made perfect sense for Atlantic Salmon for Northern Maine.

“Smolt cost you a couple dollars apiece. So if you want a million of them, that means you’d have to have 2 million bucks a year,” Barresi said. “I said, ‘That’s crazy. We can grow fry.'”

The Dug Brook facility is capable of handling more than 2 million eggs per year, though their suppliers at Mactaquac haven’t yet been able to provide that many.

And after those fish hatch in June each year, they are transported to various sites on the Aroostook River and introduced to their new home … a home imprinted on the fish and to which those fish will try to return.

Barresi said the Sheridan hatchery is a perfect spot for a fry hatchery: Its water comes via gravity feed from Dug Brook and doesn’t need to be pumped, and it’s centrally located to the site where stocking will take place.

And though Barresi whets his salmon-fishing appetite at his camp on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, he’s holding out hope that the fish return to his home water and that adult fish eventually swim past his camp on the Aroostook River as they head upstream.

“I remember the last [large fish] I netted on the Miramichi, and that first strike when he came up and grabbed that fly. You thought you had the whole world by the tail,” Barresi said. “They’re a wonderful sporting fish worth all the effort it takes to bring them back.”

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.